family, whose name was not given out, recently died." Polly?) By January 15th, the Times reported fifty cases nationwide, including eleven in New York City, and seven deaths, including one in Qyeens and one in Yonkers. Doctors insisted, in vain, that " th . L'. al al " ere was no occaSIon lor gener arm, and "stressed the fact that in none of the cases reported so far in New Y orkhas the diagnosis been definitely established as psittacosis." Later that day-after the Times went to press with the death count-authorities revealed that blood tests on the N ew York dead had all come out negative. The Times, whose coverage of parrot fever was, all things considered, a model of restraint and clarity, made a point of announcing those negative tests. Elsewhere, though, autopsies and blood cultures that came out negative for psit- tacosis didn't make it into the papers. By now, Lillian Martin and Edith and Lee Kalmeywere fast improving; this was not widely reported, either. People who got better simply fell out of the news. T he nationwide sweep for psittaco- sis soon supplied Armstrong with enough samples-parrots, healthy, sick, and dead; the blood from infected hu- mans; and even the scrapings from Lil- lian Martin's birdcage-to begin his work, which he conducted in two base- ment rooms in the Hygienic Laboratory, aided by his technician, Henry (Shorty) Anderson. "Those parrots were sure mean bastards," Armstrong said. Arm- strong and Anderson wore rubber gloves, put trays filled with cresol in the door- ways, and covered the birds' cages with disinfectant-soaked curtains. They were not, however, especially fastidious. "The only thing hygienic about the Hygienic Laboratorywas its name," one researcher there said. Armstrong explained, "If we'd got too careful, we'd have spent all our time being careful and how could we have found out anything about it?" This was yet another hallmark of the swashbuckling microbe hunter, who lacked the fussiness of the housewife. "Germ" became a household word in the nineteen-teens. By the twenties, Ameri- cans, and especially housewives, lived in fear of germs. Not only did newspapers and magazines run almost daily stories about newly discovered germs like undu- lant fever but their pages were filled with advertisements for hygiene products, like Listerine (first sold over the counter in 1914 and, in manyways, the granddaddy of Pur ell), Lysol (marketed, in 1918, as an anti-flu measure), Kotex ("feminine hygiene," the first menstrual pad, intro- duced in 1920, a postwar conversion of a surgical dressing developed by Kimberly- Clark), Cellophane (1923), and Kleenex (1924; another Kimberly-Clark product, sold as a towel for removing makeup until a consumer survey revealed that people were using it to blow their noses). Perhaps because kitchens and laborato- ries have much in common, journalists like de Kruif strove to underscore the manliness of the microbe hunter. Arm- strong, de Kruif wrote, "was definitely not the kind of man who would even own a parrot, let alone kiss it." Armstrong and Anderson and other government scientists worked night and day. On January 13th, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported a landmark success: "PARROT FEVER GERM ISOLATED." T he parrot-fever story made the mal- ady out to be virulent, mysterious, and exotic, despite these facts: the disease was not baffling; it had been identified in the nineteenth century; it was known to infect members of the Psittacidae fam- ily, which includes parrots, parakeets, macaws, and cockatoos; in the nineteen- thirties, the only birds likely to be conta- gious were those brought to the United States during the last months of 1929; it is possible to catch the disease only from an infected bird (people can't spread it); it infected then, and continues to infect today, between one and two hundred Americans every year. There was a dan- ger, to be sure. Psittacosis is now easily treated with antibiotics like doxycycline, but that wasn't the case in 1930, when one in five people infected with the dis- ease died. Nevertheless, the only people who had much to worry about were peo- ple who had been in quite close contact with certain tropical birds very recently imported from South America. Psittacosis incited, if briefly, a sizable panic among people who, by any reason- able measure, had nothing to fear. That was dangerous. Even as the story un- folded, what to make of parrot fever and just how much responsibility the press or the scientific community bore for the panic proved matters of dispute. Butwhat happened next seems nearly as dangerous as the panic itself people suddenly started insisting that parrot fever didn't exist. "u.S. ALARM OVER PARROT DISEASE NOT WARRANTED," the Chicago Daily Tribune declared, on January 15th. Less than two weeks into the story, parrot fever looked, suddenly, silly. Parrot fever became a national joke. A Washington correspondent for the Times filed a story about a parrot owned by Secretary of State Henry Stimson. The parrot, named the Old Soak, had been locked in the basement of the Pan-American Build- ing, "not because he has psittacosis" but because he had a habit of swearing. The Wall Street Journal ran this joke: what did the janitor say when the professor at the Polytechnic Institute asked him why he was cleaning the lab with carbolic acid? "'So none of de Poly students gets dis new parrot fever.'" Even the straight stories weren't taken seriously. "A par- rot foundling made its appearance early yesterday morning when a green bird with a chipped beak was discovered in the vestibule of John Schreyer's home, 25-27 Humphreys Street, East Elmhurst, Qyeens," the Times reported, whereupon jailbirds at Sing Sing offered asylum for all unwanted parrots; the warden said, "The inmates here think this talk about parrot fever is nonsense." A pro-parrot lobby formed. OnJan- uary 17th, six of the country's leading im- porters of winged pets, including the Odenwald Bird Company, the Imperial Pet Shop, and the DaWe Bird Company of Philadelphia, gathered at the Hotel Commodore in New York, where they founded the Bird Dealers' Association of America. Prussia and Bavaria, suffering from their own outbreaks, had already instituted parrot embargoes. The bird business was in a bad way. The Bird Dealers fought back by claiming that the disease did not exist, had never existed in human beings, "and that the scare over 'parrot fever' had been chiefly brought about by the active imagination of a Bal- . " timore newspaper man. Exaggeration breeds exaggeration. The counter-story spread as wildly as the story had. And the Bird Dealers had a point about the imagination of newspa- permen. The first American doctor to be- lieve he had seen psittacosis had read about it in the newspaper. The Martins' doctor probably read Hearst's Baltimore THE NEW YORKER, JUNE I, 2009 49